Position Papers - February 2017

A review of Catholic affairs

An Authentic Human Ecology Erika Bachiochi

Monsignor Fernando Ocáriz: The new Prelate of Opus Dei Rev Gavan Jennings

Film review: Number 506 · February 2017 €3 · £2.50 · $4

La La Land

Joseph McAleer

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Number 506 · February 2017 Editorial

by Rev. Gavan Jennings

In Passing: “With an alien people clutching their gods”

by Michael Kirke

Monsignor Fernando Ocáriz: The new Prelate of Opus Dei

by Rev. Gavan Jennings

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by Steven McDonald

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Safeguarding the Conditions for an Authentic Human Ecology

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“Forgiving my attacker saved my life”

by Erika Bachiochi

The Real Meaning of St Valentine’s Day

by Fr Steve Grunow

“A Smile and Joy”

by Don Carlo de Marchi

God Bless Africa!

by Tim O’Sullivan

Book review: Doctor Zhivago at 60: a spiritual masterpiece

by Edward N. Peters

Film review: La La Land Editor: Assistant editors: Subscription manager: Secretary: Design:

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by Joseph McAleer Rev. Gavan Jennings Michael Kirke, Pat Hanratty, Brenda McGann Liam Ó hAlmhain Dick Kearns Eblana Solutions

28 30 32 36 39

Contact us The editor, Position Papers, P.O. Box 4948, Rathmines, Dublin 6 email: editor@positionpapers.ie; website: www.positionpapers.ie Tel.+ 353 86065 2313 For new or renewed subscriptions contact: info@positionpapers.ie

Articles ©Position Papers, who normally will on application give permission to reproduce gratis subject only to a credit in this form: ‘Reprinted, with permission from Position Papers, Dublin’. Please note: the opinions expressed in articles do not necessarily reflect those of the editor nor of the Opus Dei Prelature of which he is a priest.

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Editorial

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n 22nd January Pope Francis gave a wide ranging interview to the El País newspaper which, while it might have said nothing new was very interesting in the way it encapsulated many of the concerns of the Holy Father. While touching on many themes, he once again called on Catholics to be truly evangelical, indeed flagging the great importance of evangelical spirit among the faithful. When asked: “What are your main concerns with regard to the Church and the world in general?” he replied as follows: With regard to the Church, I would say that I hope that it never stops being close. Close to the people. Proximity. A Church that is not close is not a Church. It's a good NGO. Or a good and pious organization made up of good people that does good, meets for tea and work in charity…. The hallmark of the Church is its proximity, being close siblings. We all are the Church. Therefore, the problem we should avoid is breaking that closeness. Closeness among everyone. Being close is touching, touching Christ in flesh and blood through your neighbour. When Jesus tells us how are we going to be judged, in Matthew chapter 25, he always talks about reaching to your neighbour: I was hungry, I was in prison, I was sick…. Always being close to the needs of your neighbour. Which is not just charity. It is much more.

Of course Pope Francis has been repeating the same message ad nauseum, and dedicated a whole encyclical to this, and yet one might be forgiven for thinking that the message was not getting through to the faithful, or that this pressing calls to arms from the Vicar of Christ has become lost in the din around what the Pope has or has not said in Amoris Laetitia chapter 8, or what the Pope may or may not have said to journalists on plane journeys throughout the world (and in fact probably did NOT say given the media’s unerring gift for misquoting him (see www.christianpost.com/news/7-timespope-francis-was-misquoted-132679/ for some telling examples).

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While most Catholics must be very happy with the promptness with which President Trump has defunded Planned Parenthood, there is a danger in our putting too much store in the actions of a political leader. In the same interview, when asked about the inauguration of President Trump, the Pope pointed out that in times of crisis human beings are more liable to fall for charismatic leaders who promise much but then don’t deliver:

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… the case of Germany in 1933 is typical, a people who were immersed in a crisis, who were searching for their identity until this charismatic leader came and promised to give their identity back, and he gave them a distorted identity, and we all know what happened. Where there is no conversation... Can borders be controlled? Yes, each country has the right to control its borders, who comes in and who goes out, and those countries at risk – from terrorism or such things – have even more of a right to control them, but no country has the right to deprive its citizens of the possibility to talk with their neighbours.

And no, Pope Francis did not draw a comparison between Trump and Hitler (despite what some silly headlines said). With an abundance of common sense he said that it would be premature to assail him either as a messiah or as a disaster: I think that we must wait and see. I don't like to get ahead of myself nor judge people prematurely. We will see how he acts, what he does, and then I will have an opinion. But being afraid or rejoicing beforehand because of something that might happen is, in my view, quite unwise. It would be like prophets predicting calamities or windfalls that will not happen.

Besides, the Pope pointed out, it is the saints who are the true saviours of history:

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The history of the Church has not been driven by theologians, or priests, or nuns, or bishops…. Maybe in part, but the true heroes of the Church are the saints. That is, those men and women that devoted their lives to make the Gospel a reality. Those are the ones that have saved us: the saints.

We should not be waiting for saviour presidents, saviour Popes, or saviour bishops to sort out the mess of our age. Each Christian, the Pope keeps reminding us, is to be a saviour. Each one of us is called to evangelise the flesh and blood persons we encounter each day, and this is what Pope Francis has been repeating since the outset of his papacy, and in a particular way in the encyclical Evangelii Gaudium: “On the lips of the catechist the first proclamation must ring out over and over: “Jesus Christ loves you; he gave his life to save you; and now he is living at your side every day to enlighten, strengthen, and free you.” This first proclamation is called “first” not because it exists at the beginning and can then be forgotten or replaced by other more important things. It is first in a qualitative sense because it is the principal proclamation, the one which we must hear again and again in different ways, the one which we must announce one way or another throughout the process of catechesis, at every level and moment (Evangelii Gaudium 164).

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In the El País interview Pope Francis points out that he takes this call to evangelisation largely from Pope Paul VI: Evangelii Gaudium, which frames the pastoral principles that I want for the Church, is an update of Paul VI’s Evangelii Nuntiandi.

He is a man who was ahead of history. And he suffered a lot. He was a martyr. There were many things that he wasn’t able to do, he was a realistic person and he knew that he wasn’t able and he suffered for it, but he offered his suffering. He did what he could.

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And the best thing that he did was planting the seeds. The seeds of things that history collected afterwards. Evangelii Gaudium is a mix of Evangelii Nuntiandi and the Aparecida document.

In the light of this call to evangelise (the call to kerygma we might say), it would be a terrible pity if the Amoris Laetitia controversy were to lead us to get distracted by a doctrinal matter which really must be left to ecclesiastical leaders and theologians to examine.

This issue, and others like it, may be important in their own right but they cannot be an excuse for failing to heed the call, made so clearly and insistently by the Holy Father, to engage in a fullblooded work of evangelising the world in which we live.

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In Passing: “With an alien people clutching their gods”

by Michael Kirke t is difficult to pick up any leftleaning newspaper, magazine or journal in the weeks since Donald Trump stunned the world, without finding another wounded progressivist warrior licking his or her wounds. For some – without stretching the analogy too far – the scene is reminiscent of that in Book I of Paradise Lost where Lucifer is trying to pull his forces together to devise a strategy for a new war on the victorious Enemy.

Not that for a moment I am equating Donald J. Trump with the Almighty.

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an exercise of self-examination is called for. What must we now do, they ask each other, to get their long revolution back on track? Some are still at the scapegoat stage – who among ourselves has done this? Why? Others are calling for an assessment of the tactics of the enemy. How did the Right win this battle? What nefarious trickery did they use to vanquish us in such a humiliating way?

How did America forget all the sublime lessons in political correctness we have been teaching it?

For the American Democratic Party and its faithful, it is imperative that they now do this.

But prior to taking such action

A writer in The Guardian in the aftermath of Trump’s victory went down this road. She sets the whole thing in a wider

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context of what she sees and the Right’s general chicanery. Moira Weigel’s long article, “Political correctness: how the right invented a phantom enemy”, purports to take us through the history of this monster and show us that no such phenomenon really exists.

So what? Phrases that catch the imagination are nothing new.

Just because they hit the media jackpot does not mean that they are phantoms – that they do not represent something inimical to a culture. A phrase is just a phrase. The deep and allpervasive cultural reality behind this little phrase is what matters.

This reality is something that has been in the cultural mix of America and the West for more than a century.

The line of argument really misses the point. It may be true that, as she says, “most Americans had never heard the phrase ‘politically correct’ before 1990, when a wave of stories began to appear in newspapers and magazines.” She traces the progress of what then became an explosion of awareness. As far as she is concerned it all began in that year with New York Times reporter Richard Bernstein’s article, “The Rising Hegemony of the Politically Correct.”

As a phrase, the earliest use of the term came in 1936, according to the MerriamWebster dictionary. POLITICALLY CORRECT: conforming to a belief that language and practices which could offend political sensibilities (as in matters of sex or race) should be eliminated.

Following the publication of that article, in the remainder of that year, the term is used more than 700 times across media. The next year it makes 2,500 appearances and 2,800 in 1992.

But forget the label. Cut to the chase. Political correctness is just one weapon in the armoury of a broader movement which launched itself on the world in a new incarnation at the beginning of the twentieth century. Political

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correctness as we now know it embodies nothing more or less than the Ten Commandments of the New Morality, manifested in the libertarian antics of 1920s in America. It also represents the cultural Marxists’ approach to ethics in the earlier decades of the twentieth century. The influence of Freud was also a powerful factor in the evolution of this new code of behaviour for the human race, a subversion of existing Judaeo-Christian moral standards.

But in the end who cares what they are called? The substance of the morality is what matters – on both sides. Both sides offer radically different visions of the good life, the purpose of life and the nature of the society which will best serve it.

Weigel dates the conservative kickback to the late 1980s, when, she maintains, a wellfunded conservative movement entered the mainstream with a series of improbable bestsellers that took aim at American higher education. The first, by the University of Chicago philosophy professor Allan Bloom, came out in 1987. “For hundreds of pages, The Closing of the American Mind argued that colleges were embracing a shallow ‘cultural relativism’ and abandoning long-established disciplines and standards in an attempt to appear liberal and to pander to their students. It sold more than 500,000 copies and inspired numerous imitations.”

What started then is still going on in those strands, libertarian and Marxist, interlocking more than ever after the fall of the Soviet bloc.

Throughout most of the twentieth century the progress of the New Morality was marked by consolidation and subversion.

Then, in the twentyfirst century, the offensive against the rival morality began in earnest. Conservatives responded to this offensive and in doing so identified many of the fundamental tenets of the movement with those already labelled as “politically correct”.

Were they really fighting a phantom menace? Hardly, if you give any credence at all to the Marxist, neo-Marxists of the

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New Left, and the libertarian warriors of the early and midtwentieth century.

consciousness” has occurred?

Whose moral doctrines are preached by liberal religious organizations, those of traditional Christianity and Judaism? Or those of secular liberalism or socialism, now dressed up in the garb of religion?

Professor Robert George of Princeton, in a recent post, recalled the words of the Italian communist and cultural Marxist, Antonio Gramsci, in 1915: Socialism is precisely the religion that must overwhelm Christianity…. In the new order, Socialism will triumph by first capturing the culture via infiltration of schools, universities, churches and the media by transforming the consciousness of society.

For Raymond Williams, doyen of the New Left in the 1960s – with his scholarly and beguiling books, Culture and Society and The Long Revolution – culture was the whole gamut of ways in which people thought, felt and acted.

In terms of the Marxists’ ambition, culture was what had to be transformed and its transformation would bring about the transformation – or as they would see it – the freeing of man from the multiple slaveries to which he had been subjected, the slaveries articulated by feminists like Kate Millet in that decade.

Who can say he was wrong, Professor George asks? What are kids being taught (formally and informally) in schools and universities about sexuality, marriage, the taking of life in the womb? What messages on these and other social issues do the mainstream media send in a thousand subtle – and sometimes not so subtle – ways? In which direction have the mainline churches gone? Is there any doubt that a “transformation of

Millet’s younger sister, Mallory, in her later years recalled: During my junior year in high school, the nuns asked about our plans for after we

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graduated. When I said I was going to attend State University, I noticed their disappointment. I asked my favorite nun, “Why?” She answered, “That means you'll leave four years later a communist and an atheist!”

What a giggle we girls had over that. “How ridiculously unsophisticated these nuns are,” we thought. Then I went to the university and four years later walked out a communist and an atheist, just as my sister Katie had six years before me.

A chastened Mallory Millet wrote of this two years ago in an article entitled, “Marxist

Feminism’s Ruined Lives” in which she recounts the horror she witnessed inside the women’s “liberation” movement.

In 1969 she was invited by her sister to a “consciousnessraising-group” – in the language of the opposing morality this would doubtless be a “conscience-forming group.

Present were twelve university educated women. The chair opened the meeting with a backand-forth recitation of the Catechism of this new religion: “Why are we here today?” she asked. “To make revolution,” they answered.

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“What kind of revolution?” “The Cultural Revolution,” they chanted.

permeated with “The Revolution”.

“And how do we make Cultural Revolution?” “By destroying the American family!”

“How do we destroy the family?” “By destroying the American Patriarch,” they cried exuberantly.

“And how do we destroy the American Patriarch?” “By taking away his power!”

That included the media, the educational system, universities, high schools, school boards, etc.; then, the judiciary, the legislatures, the executive branches and even the library system. The Gramsci programme was well and truly under way.

Millett’s books captivated academia and soon “Women’s Studies” courses were installed in colleges across the nation.

Some phantom!

“How do we do that?” “By destroying monogamy!” they shouted.

Weigel protests that the growing opposition, “these crusaders against political correctness”, are every bit as political as their opponents. She quotes Jane Mayer’s book, Dark Money: the Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right, published earlier this year, which asserts that Bloom and others were funded by networks of conservative donors – particularly the Koch, Olin and Scaife families – who had spent the 1980s building programmes

“How can we destroy monogamy?” “By promoting promiscuity, eroticism, prostitution and homosexuality!” came the plain, unvarnished and shocking answer.

Western society was to be deconstructed and to do that, they argued, they needed to invade every American institution. All must be

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that they hoped would create a new “counter-intelligentsia”.

of Professor Anthony Esolen, a colleague in another university.

How dare they, is the implication. It is just not fair.

But surely every revolution deserves its counter-revolution?

I have always thought highly of Providence College, he writes.

But the College has recently brought shame on itself by its shocking mistreatment of one of its most accomplished scholars and finest teachers: Professor Anthony Esolen.

Weigel accuses the conservatives of committing the fallacy of cherry-picking anecdotes and caricaturing the subjects of their criticism. They complained that other people were creating and enforcing speech codes, while at the same time attempting to enforce their own speech codes.

Their writers designated themselves the arbiters of what conversations or political demands deserved to be taken seriously, and which did not.

They contradicted themselves in the same way: their authors continually complained, in highly visible publications, that they were being silenced.

Clearly they were not being silenced, but that was not, is not, for want of the Left’s efforts – and these efforts continue unabated. Robert George has just had to come to the defence

Professor Esolen's crime?

Sharply criticizing identity politics and the “diversity” ideology it has generated at Providence and at colleges and universities across the country.

The administration, faculty, and students should be thoughtfully considering and engaging Professor Esolen's criticisms. If, upon reflection, they do not find them to be sound, they should respond in the currency of academic discourse – reasons, evidence, arguments – not by attempting to isolate, stigmatize, and marginalize him for stating dissenting opinions.

What we have here is a clash of cultures within Western civilization which is ultimately

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far more important than the clash being fought out in the Middle East. Are lives being lost in this clash? Yes they are; millions of them in the persons of the unborn being deliberately killed in the wombs of their mothers. Millions more are being wounded in the persons of the victims of the war on marriage and the destruction of the family.

This is no phantom; this is hard and bitter reality. Two moralities are locked in deadly combat.

Those on the side of JudaeoChristian civilization may ultimately see themselves at one with the Magi as imagined by T. S. Eliot. But, as long as they live in this “dispensation”, they have

no option other than engaging in combat with the alien menace confronting them. Millet’s warriors are still on the warpath.

We returned to our places, these Kingdoms, But no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation, With an alien people clutching their gods.

I should be glad of another death.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Michael Kirke is a freelance writer, a regular contributor to Position Papers, and a widely read blogger at Garvan Hill (www.garvan.wordpress.com). His views can be responded to at mjgkirke@gmail.com.

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Monsignor Fernando Ocáriz: The new Prelate of Opus Dei

by Rev Gavan Jennings

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n 24th January Monsignor Fernando Ocáriz was elected as the new Prelate of Opus Dei and third successor to Saint Josemaría Escrivá by an elective congress. Later that same day Pope Francis confirmed the election.

Monsignor Ocáriz was born, the youngest of eight children, in Paris on 27th October 1944, to Spanish parents exiled in France due to the Spanish Civil War. He has a degree in Physical Sciences and a doctorate in Theology.

He is a consultor for various Vatican Congregations for the Doctrine, a member of the Pontifical Theological Academy

and was a tenured professor (now emeritus) in Fundamental Theology in the Pontifical University of the Holy Cross in Rome. He has published important theological works, particularly in the area of Christology as well as theological works on Marxism and on Voltaire.

Since 1994, when he was appointed Vicar General of Opus Dei, he worked very closely with the previous Prelate, Bishop Javier Echevarría, and accompanied him on his pastoral trips to more than seventy countries.

In a 2015 interview with Zenit Mons Ocáriz was asked the

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question why the faithful and cooperators of Opus Dei refer to the Prelate as “Father” and he gave the following answer: In many countries priests, and in some places even bishops, are called “Father”. St Josemaría incarnated this sense of spiritual paternity in an intense manner. This lived experience is transmitted to his successors as a treasured inheritance, with the breath of the Holy Spirit. I think of the splendid fidelity shown by St Josemaría’s first successor, Blessed Álvaro del Portillo.

The paternity of the Prelate ensures that the faithful of the

Prelature can experience the family spirit (since the Church is a family) which is so present in the spiritual makeup of Opus Dei. The statutes of the Prelature use the words “teacher and father” to refer to the role of the Prelate. This underlines the fact that the task entrusted to the Prelate by the Church – the same for all pastors entrusted with an ecclesiastical body or territory: diocese, prelature etc. – cannot be reduced to the exercise of governing authority, but rather it includes the very important dimension of paternity towards all the faithful

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entrusted to them, both priests and laity.

In a press conference following his election as Prelate, he gave thanks to God, to the electors, and to Pope Francis for the confidence they had shown in him, and explained how he was reacting to his election:

Christians.” And he referred specifically to the work of Opus Dei to help families: “In the Prelature, a wide-ranging effort is being made to help families…. Pope Francis continually insists on pastoral care for the family, as we’ve seen with the Synod and the Apostolic Letter Amoris Laetitia. We want to follow his exhortations.”

When I stop and think about the treasures passed on to us

by Saint Josemaría, Blessed Alvaro and the most recent Prelate, all of one of whom were of such great human and supernatural stature, I feel so unworthy. I trust in the prayer of so many people and I am sure that God will help me … at the same time, before God’s providence, I am calm, because if God wanted this he will give me the help needed…. Thank God I am so serene, even if I shouldn’t be!

Speaking about Opus Dei’s apostolic work over the next few years, the Prelate said that “we face the same challenges as all of today’s

Monsignor Ocáriz (right) with Monsignor Mariano Fazio, Vicar General of Opus Dei.

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“Forgiving my attacker saved my life”

by Steven McDonald

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ormer NYPD officer Steven McDonald died on January 10, 2017. He had become known for peacemaking efforts after he survived nearfatal gunshot wounds when he was a young officer. In this article he speaks of the importance of forgiveness in coming to terms with his injury.

The world is in a bad way right now, and there is no government program, no division of Marines, no amount of money that is going to change the path that we are on.

We need God’s love and forgiveness. That’s what motivates me to let people know that there is another way.

Before I hit the streets as a new police officer, the first thing I did was to go to my local rectory and ask the priest to bless my badge. I think that put me in a good place for future events. One summer day in the early 1980s, I was on patrol with my supervisor. We saw three kids who fit the description of those who were doing crimes in the Central Park area. As I was saying, “I’m a police officer, I’d like to talk with you,” I thought I saw a weapon in the sock of one of the boys. When I made the tactical error of taking my eyes off the boys, one of them moved towards me with a small handgun. Before I could say, “don’t shoot,” the boy pulled

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the trigger. It was very loud, scary loud.

The first bullet entered my head. As I fell backwards, the boy stepped closer and shot me in the throat, and then as I lay on the ground he shot me a third time. As they brought me into the Emergency Room, I’m told, the surgeon said, “This kid’s not going to live; you better bring his family here to say goodbye.” There was a young police officer standing nearby, no rank, no high station, but when he heard that, he stepped forward into the crowd and said, “We need to give him a second chance.” I believe that was the Holy Spirit speaking through Brian, who is my friend today.

Just like that, they loaded me up on a special ambulance and flew me down to Bellevue. It was there they truly saved my life.

With Cardinal John O’Connor’s support, we had Mass at my bedside every day from July until the following April. It was a game changer. With each

passing day, the hospital room became more like a chapel. The darkness was lifted and light filled the room, and that’s the way my life has been ever since.

My wife Patti Ann was pregnant with our first child when I was shot. After one particularly negative meeting with the doctor, we didn’t have much hope. When he left, Patti Ann collapsed on the floor and I had no way of calling for help.

It was one of those dark, dark days when I didn’t think I wanted to live much longer.

One day, I was looking out a dirty window, caught up in my thoughts. All of a sudden I felt this soft little face touching my skin. My wife was able to sneak up behind me with our new baby. It was like being touched by the finger of God. The message I received was, “Here’s this new life; you have to live for him.”

During a press conference after the shooting, Patti Ann told everyone that I wanted to forgive the boy who shot me.

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The media were taken aback; they weren’t expecting it. But if I chose not to forgive Shavod Jones, I don’t think I would be alive. All the negative emotions would have overtaken me.

Once I said yes to the idea of forgiveness, it freed me and I was able to move forward with my purpose in God’s plan.

This text, from www.cruxnow.com, comes from an interview carried out for a Knights of Columbus documentary, The Face of Mercy, which aired recently on ABC affiliated stations and will be shown on the EWTN television network.

Shavod died in a motorcycle accident three days after his release from prison. I never had the chance to help him, but my wife encouraged me to reach out to kids like him so they might know life without the violence on the streets.

Once I was in Northern Ireland doing peace work with my friend, Father Mychal Judge, the Franciscan friar who died in the World Trade Towers on 9/11. On a rather difficult day, he said to me, “Steven, you have to place your trust and your hope in Jesus, just like that.” I understand much better now that our world needs prayer, and that God always answers our prayers, even though the answers come in his time.

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Safeguarding the Conditions for an Authentic Human Ecology

by Erika Bachiochi

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uman ecology, a concept developed by sociologists early last century and appropriated by Pope John Paul II in his heralded Centesimus Annus, provides an illuminating lens through which to understand the multifaceted cultural crisis in which we find ourselves today.

Using the term as a cultural analogue to growing concerns over natural ecology, John Paul II wrote in 1991: Although people are rightly worried . . . about preserving the natural habitats . . . too little effort is made to safeguard the moral conditions for an authentic

“human ecology.� Not only has God given the earth to man, who must use it with respect for the original good purpose for which it was given to him, but man too is God's gift to man. A person must therefore respect the natural and moral structure with which he has been endowed.

More recently, in Laudato Si, Pope Francis reiterated John Paul II’s broadly framed ecological concern that had been handed on, we might say, through Pope Benedict. Francis writes: Human ecology also implies another profound reality: the

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relationship between human life and the moral law, which is inscribed in our nature and is necessary for the creation of a more dignified environment. Pope Benedict spoke of an “ecology of man,” based on the fact that “man too has a nature that he must respect and that he cannot manipulate at will.”

For these recent popes, “the ecology of man” seems to approximate what would have been described classically as natural law: the idea that the human person possesses a nature that must be understood and nurtured for his full flourishing (eudaimonia, for the Greeks; beatitude, for the Christians). But the modern connotations of both nature and law are, without a great unlearning, too fixed or static to represent the dynamism of the human person in an authentic way. Consequently, natural law as a concept today is greatly misunderstood. For most, it is almost unintelligible.

Human ecology, by contrast, allows one to reflect with fewer

intellectual stumbling blocks upon the design and dynamism of the human person and his life experience. That is, human ecology more readily calls to mind the reality that the human person is created and yet, by his choices, creates himself; that he is deeply influenced by and, in turn, influences others; that he is conditioned by the environment in which he finds himself and yet is capable of transcending it. The analogy to natural ecology is helpful in today’s philosophical climate, because it implies an interdependence of influences and actors, a complexity of causes and effects, while calling for empirical and scientific validation. Just as we can measure toxins in our waterways, we can use social science to empirically corroborate the destructive “downstream effects” of the pill, pornography, and fatherlessness on real women, men, and children. Contrary to the prevailing libertarian view, the ecological analogy also reveals that the putatively “harmless” acts of solitary individuals, when adopted by a

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large proportion of the population, can have deeply harmful effects.

Protecting Our Natural and Social Ecosystems Both our natural ecosystems and our social ecosystems are fragile: they need protection and cultivation to thrive. As Pope Francis said in November 2014: The crisis in the family has produced an ecological crisis, for social environments, like natural environments, need protection. And although the human race has come to understand the need to address conditions that menace our natural environments, we have been slower to recognize that our fragile social environments are under threat as well.

vulnerable, fragile human beings who are most threatened by, and least equipped to protect themselves from, a deteriorating moral environment. We see this most clearly with the sharp decline in marriage among the poor, disproportionately harming those very communities most in need of the myriad personal, social, and economic benefits life-long marriage provides.

Human ecology, then, implicitly assumes the existence of the natural law, but it may be better able to capture the dynamic social influences that either support or undermine respect for that law – and it is, helpfully, susceptible to empirical measurement in a way that natural law simpliciter is not obviously. From Centisimus Annus: Man receives from God his essential dignity and with it the capacity to transcend every social order so as to move towards truth and goodness. But he is also conditioned by the social structure in which he lives,

As with Laudato Si’s striking claim that the decadent consumer habits of the first world are disproportionately harming the world’s poor, sociological data confirm quite clearly that it is the most

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by the education he has received and by his environment. These elements can either help or hinder his living in accordance with the truth.

seeks to understand the human subject from within his “nested,” varied, and everchanging arrangement of environmental structures. An ecological approach is one that is by nature interdisciplinary, that seeks to integrate diverse perspectives to achieve a wider angle.

In that foundational document of Catholic social teaching, then, John Paul II was urging the creation of a more dignified social environment, a social ecology worthy of the dignity of the human person.

Social Ecology When John Paul II used the term “human ecology” in Centesimus Annus, he was entering a robust conversation that was already taking place among social thinkers. Since the beginning of the last century, social scientists had been making use of the term to describe the idea of society as a complex organism and to study the myriad ways in which surroundings influence the human person. The RussianAmerican psychologist Urie Bronfenbrenner notably wrote in 1977 of an “ecology of human development” in which one

By the 1990s, social theorists from across the political spectrum were thinking ecologically about the dynamic interaction among familial, political, economic, and social influences and about how these “mutually conditioning systems” affected children, families, and communities across America. The ecological analogy helped a diverse group of thinkers to diagnose (even without agreeing on causes) the growing deterioration of once stable families and communities, the deleterious impact that was having on the nation’s children and the nation’s poor, and the consequences of this cultural, or ecological, disintegration on American institutions. In particular, communitarians

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such as Mary Ann Glendon, Michael Sandel, and Amitai Etzioni worried that America’s celebrated free economic and political institutions were at great risk of undermining their own foundations due to an erosion of the “moral ecology” or, in Robert Putnam’s term, “social capital” that these free institutions needed to thrive.

and a just and humane economy.

At that time, few would have denied that America’s systems of free market capitalism and constitutional democracy had shown themselves to be the best in the world at guaranteeing individual liberty, creating wealth and opportunity, and providing the space needed for full human flourishing. This is why John Paul II, for the first time in the Catholic Church’s history, expressly endorses such systems in Centesimus Annus – at least when they are duly constrained by a robust moral culture. Our free economic and political institutions, after all, say nothing of how we are to use our freedom and wealth or how to transmit the habits of mind and heart that are necessary for self-government

And so, as Centesimus Annus strongly proclaimed, without countervailing cultural values that teach individuals to use their freedom and their wealth for the common good, the capitalist quest for material gain will inform and ultimately erode the culture, giving rise to hedonism, individualism, and consumerism. Similarly, without a strong cultural edifice promoting the true, the good, and the beautiful, our liberal democracy’s tendency to give equal hearing to all ideas will corrode the culture, leading to a relativization of all lifestyles, the tyranny of popular opinion, an equality that demands erasure of all differences (including biological ones), and an undermining of religion, the most vital force in culture.

How close to home all of this sounds to us today.

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Freedom, Virtue, and Human Dependency Free institutions do provide an important precondition for a robust moral environment or social ecology: freedom. But freedom – whether it be political or economic, personal, or even religious – can never be its own end. Without discounting the importance of freedom to human ecology, we must say that freedom is merely instrumental. Freedom is at the service of human ecology and human flourishing. But this instrument, this servant – freedom – also has its own preconditions that it cannot provide for of itself. The proper end and the necessary precondition of freedom are the same: virtue.

interest through a system of checks and balances, and well understood that selfgovernment needs particularly virtuous men to sustain it, Glendon suggests that they seemed to take for granted that Americans would continue to be formed in the sorts of social environments that would produce this sort of virtue – environments like the deeply religious, tightly knit, selfgoverning colonies that stood as the backdrop of, and provided some of the impetus for, the Constitutional Convention.

Glendon writes:

As Harvard law professor Mary Ann Glendon has argued throughout her influential and deeply prescient work, the American founders designed a remarkable system of free institutions, but they didn’t assure the conditions for that freedom. That is, though they guarded against rampant self-

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If history teaches us anything, it is that a liberal democracy is not just a given; that there seem to be conditions that are more, or less, favorable to its maintenance, and that these conditions importantly involve character….

Character, too, has conditions – residing in no small degree in nurture and education. Thus one can hardly escape from acknowledging the political importance of the family.

Without a virtuous citizenry, John Adams memorably warns us, democracy always commits suicide. Freedom, without virtue, seems bent on its own self-destruction, as we witness all too well in our country these days. But, of course, virtue cannot be taken for granted. It must be taught, inculcated, practiced, and esteemed in every generation, every family, and every human heart. This is a tall order – and a real struggle for anyone who takes it seriously – but it is this interior struggle that was passed from one generation to the next until quite recently.

Indeed, over the last several decades, we have witnessed the Supreme Court in particular use arguments from personal autonomy (or freedom misunderstood as its own end) to weaken precisely those institutions – motherhood, fatherhood, marriage, other mediating structures – that are best suited to sustain the social ecology, to shape persons to use their freedom well. America’s long tradition of selfdetermination has morphed

over the years into a constitutionalized sort of noholds-barred self-invention, the freedom to define myself just as I wish, free from any claims or constraints upon me.

And herein lies the problem, a problem perhaps brought into clearer focus by the ecological lens. The self-defining, selfsufficient, radically autonomous individual at the heart of this modern paradigm simply does not exist. From the very moment each of us comes into being, we are embodied, fragile, and embedded in relationships, nested in our social environment. We are social, or political, animals, as Aristotle put it. And as such, our freedom is constrained by our dependence on others and, as we mature, others’ dependence on us. Human vulnerability and dependence are the most basic and enduring facts of human existence, of human identity, before even sin. We human beings flourish or fail to within the context of this interdependence, never in isolation. As the philosopher Alasdair MacIntryre reminds

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us, the responsible adult independence for which we properly strive requires the prior care and sacrifice of others, of mothers and fathers, of families, of communities; we do not acquire the virtues necessary for independence, for the good use of our freedom, for flourishing on our own. We depend on others to teach us these virtues – and to model them for us.

duties we have toward God and one another, we must take far more seriously – far more seriously – the care, nurture, and cultivation of the young in virtue, and also of the social organisms that support such cultivation. We must focus, as John Paul II tells us in Centesimus Annus, on that “first and fundamental structure for ‘human ecology,’ the family,” and all that supports its critical work.

And so, if we are to safeguard (or these days we may need to say, recreate) the moral conditions for an authentic human ecology, a culture worthy of the dignity of the person, one that encourages rather than discourages the

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Erika Bachiochi is a Visiting Fellow at the Ethics & Public Policy Center, Washington D.C. This essay was adapted from the luncheon presentation she gave at the Human Ecology Conference at the Busch School of Business and Economics at CUA in Spring 2016 and originally appeared at Public Discourse: Ethics, Law and the Common Good (see www.thepublicdiscourse.com) and is reprinted with permission.

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The Real Meaning of St Valentine’s Day

by Fr Steve Grunow

O

n 14th of February the Church celebrates the witness of Saints Cyril and Methodius – no, I did not just make a mistake. While that date remains in the popular culture associated with Saint Valentine, a Roman priest who died sometime around the year 270, the official calendar of the Catholic Church no longer recognizes today as the Feast of Saint Valentine.

Saint Valentine’s feast day was a victim of a purge of saints’ feast days from the Church’s calendar following the Second Vatican Council. The reason cited for this move is often given as that some saints lacked the necessary historical provenance to justify their commemoration. In other words, history has so given way to legend that it was no longer possible to discern the truth from fiction.

Saints Cyril and Methodius are known as the apostles to the Slavs, which meant they were missionaries in that region of Europe in which the culture of the East meets the culture of the west.

Their missionary efforts represent a co-operation between the Church of the west and the east, demonstrating that Latin and Orthodox Christianity have been able at times to work together to accomplish common goals.

Along with their zeal for evangelization, the two saints are known as the Fathers of the Slavic language. They developed the Glagolithic or Cyrillic alphabet, the elegant script of which can still be seen today in letters of the Russian and other eastern European languages.

This may be the case, but whatever the Church might have gained in accuracy, was paid for with a loss of poetic vision.

Culture and language are linked and the Church is a builder and creator of both. Missionary efforts are civilizing endeavors, and lead to rich expressions of art, literature, architecture, science and theology.

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The popular culture of modernity resists this truth about religion in general and Christianity in particular, but the witness and legacy of St. Cyril and Methodius contradicts the lie that faith is poisonous to the project of human flourishing.

What we know of the “real” Saint Valentine is that he was a Roman priest who was killed because he would not renounce his faith in the Lord Jesus. If the date of around 270 is right for his death, he was martyred during the reign of the Roman emperor Claudius the Goth (Goth refers to his cultural affiliation, not his preference for black clothing).

Legend records that Saint Valentine was killed when he was discovered presiding at the marriage of a Christian couple, thus the association of the saint with romantic love and affection.

More likely is that devotion to the saint melded with customs associated with the Roman feast of Lupercalia – a carnival like event in which young man wandered the street wearing only the skin that God gave them and accosting young ladies who had the misfortune of appearing outdoors.

The custom sounds bizarre if not illegal to us. It was a fertility ritual and the in your face sensuality of it was domesticated (one might say “Christianized”) over time. I imagine most would prefer gifts of chocolates, flowers and greeting cards to naked young men running amok in the streets.

Lupercalia was celebrated around February 13th to the 15th.

Saint Valentine, as a martyr, represents a different kind of love than that of the popular culture’s vision of romantic affection. His love is the love of God in Christ, not mere affection, but a willingness to given one’s whole life as a sacrifice for one’s beloved.

Christ’s love is precisely this kind of love. Saint Valentine accepted this love, and in his willingness to die rather than deny Christ, he demonstrated such love himself.

That is a witness worth remembering – whether or not the Feast of Saint Valentine is formally celebrated on February 14.

This article first appeared at: www.wordonfire.org. Father Steve Grunow is the CEO of Word on Fire Catholic Ministries.

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“A Smile and Joy”

by Don Carlo de Marchi

“Y

ou can’t proclaim the Gospel with a funeral face.” Pope Francis’ provocative words are not merely a joke, and the idea that Christians shouldn’t appear sad to others isn’t something new. Nietzsche said: “They need to sing a better song to me, if they want me to believe in their Saviour. His disciples need to look like people who are saved.”

But how can we smile when worries, work, small setbacks and great suffering are so frequent in life?

The first smile is the most important one: “May the Lord smile upon you,” the Bible says.

And also, “The joy of the Lord is your strength.” God’s smile comes first. The joy with which the Creator contemplates each of his creatures should be the solid

foundation of our serenity and peace.

But isn’t it irreverent to think of God, the Lord of the Universe, as smiling? “God’s love for us must be the greater the more we can make him laugh,” says a character in one of Ray Bradbury’s stories. “I never thought of God as humorous,” someone replies. And the first person quickly responds: “The creator of the platypus, the camel, the ostrich, and man? Oh, come now!”

The second smile is that with which I look at myself. Without overlooking my humanity, my limitations, which aren’t necessarily defects and shouldn’t be taken too seriously. My Creator loves me as I am, because if he wanted me to be different, he would have made me different.

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“I think it’s very important to be able to see the funny side of life and its joyful dimension and not to take everything too tragically,” Benedict XVI once remarked. “I’d also say it’s necessary for my ministry. A writer once said that angels can fly because they don’t take themselves too seriously.

Maybe we could also fly a bit if we didn’t think we were so important.”

Smiling is an act of humility; it means I accept myself and my way of being, remaining where I am with a holy peace. Without taking myself too seriously, because, as G.K. Chesterton said, “seriousness is not a virtue. It would be a heresy, but a much more sensible heresy, to say that seriousness is a vice. It is really a natural trend or lapse into taking one’s self gravely, because it is the easiest thing to do. It is much easier to write a good Times leading article than a good joke in Punch. For solemnity flows out of men naturally, but laughter is a leap. It is easy to be heavy: hard to be light. Satan fell by the force of gravity.”

ones. It is the smile with which I welcome other people, especially those with whom I live and work.

Showing them affection, without giving too much importance to possible mistakes or frictions.

When receiving the Nobel Prize, Mother Teresa of Calcutta, with a joyful smile, surprised the audience with this suggestion of hers: “Smile at each other, make time for each other in your family.”

“The clothing, the smile and the way of walking reveal a person’s heart,” says the Book of Wisdom.

A smile can truly be the sign that enables others to recognize a Christian.

The third smile is the consequence of the two previous

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Don Carlo de Marchi is the Vicar of Opus Dei for CentralSouth Italy. This article first appeared on the Opus Dei website (see www.opusdei.ie).

God Bless Africa!

by Tim O’Sullivan

T

he hour of Africa has come, Pope John Paul exclaimed twenty years ago in his Apostolic Exhortation, Ecclesia in Africa, which was written in 1995 after a Special Synod of Bishops on that Continent. John Paul had a deep love of Africa and was very attentive to its needs, visiting the Continent on multiple occasions and reaching around forty African countries in the course of his long pontificate.

This writer, in contrast, has made just two short visits to Africa, the second at the end of 2016, but my experience, brief as it was, has nevertheless prompted these short reflections, which have also been

nourished by a reading of Ecclesia in Africa.

A first reflection is that a visit to Africa takes you out of your comfort zone and reminds the European visitor that he does indeed live in a comfort zone!

Vaccinations, anti-malaria tablets, unfamiliar food, stifling heat, uncomfortable travel conditions, challenging roads, disconcerting poverty‌. The comforts of Europe, at least for the middle classes, can often be taken for granted.

A short visit to Africa does not provide an in-depth experience of the challenges the Continent faces but it does give an introductory flavour and helps

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you to appreciate more fully the long- term service of others, including those from Ireland.

In late 2016, I visited a Focolare mission in Fontem in the Cameroon where my late sister worked for a period as a doctor.

I was deeply impressed by the wonderful work done by the Focolare movement over fifty years, through its announcement and living of the Gospel in local parishes, through the establishment of a school and hospital as well as carpentry and building workshops and through its respectful interaction with local people and their rich cultural traditions. Great strides have been made in fifty years, for example, there has been a huge reduction in infant mortality and major progress in the education of the young.

Irish religious had not been particularly present in the corner of Africa I visited, though Irish Holy Rosary sisters had done sterling work in a nearby region. However, my African visit made me reflect again on the great work done, and hardships endured, by overseas

missionaries, including those from our own country. Irish Congregations in Africa have included the Spiritans, the SMA and OLA societies, the Kiltegan Fathers, the White Fathers and the Medical Missionaries of Mary, to name but a few.

Ecclesia in Africa wrote of ‘the heroic and selfless dedication of generations of missionaries’ (par. 35) As one example of this dedication, I recalled the experience of a missionary relative, who served in Nigeria in the 1950s at a time of poor communications with home and only heard of his mother’s death well after the event.

Contact with Africa inevitably provokes reflection on the future of that great Continent and its future place on the world stage.

While global population projections must be treated with considerable caution as they have often been associated with alarmist ‘population explosion’ propaganda, it does seem fair to say that the African Continent is moving to the global top table in population terms, at the same

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time as Europe declines. With a population of over a billion people, up from around 220 million in 1950, it has overtaken Europe and, according to the website geohive.com, may contain close to a quarter of the world’s population by 2050 while Europe’s share, if its demographic decline continues, is likely to have decreased from nearly 22% in 1950 to around 8% by 2050. The implications of these major demographic changes for future global politics and economics will be worked out in the coming decades.

Africa’s pro-life culture received strong praise in Ecclesia in Africa: ‘The peoples of Africa respect the life which is conceived and born. They rejoice in this life. They reject the idea that it can be destroyed, even when the so-called ‘progressive civilizations’ would like to lead them in this direction…’ (EA, 43). That document also stated that the Church in Africa ’stands resolutely on the side of the oppressed and of voiceless and of marginalized people’ (EA, 44).

Ecclesia in Africa also called attention in a very direct way to Africa’s needs, arguing that its peoples faced huge difficulties but that the Church had the duty to affirm vigorously that these difficulties could be overcome: ‘History is not closed in upon itself but is open to God’s Kingdom’ (EA, 14).

Africa will face major economic and social challenges in the decades ahead and will continue to need fraternal support and solidarity from elsewhere but the visitor leaves with a strong sense of the Continent’s great human riches. Ecclesia in Africa summarizes these as being a profound religious sense, love of the family and respect for life, veneration of ancestors, and an acute sense of solidarity and community.

During my visit, I was particularly struck by the strong African sense of community, expressed in vibrant celebrations of Mass and joyful singing and dancing, the blaze of bright colours, the straight talking, the gracious welcome offered to the outsider and a

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deep sense of belonging to the Church, as reflected, for example, in the pride expressed in their Catholic school by past pupils walking in procession in class years at the anniversary celebration of the school.

considerable, the Continent and its peoples are also a great gift to the Church and the world. God Bless Africa!

Twenty years ago, Ecclesia in Africa stated that the growth of the Church in Africa in recent centuries has been a marvellous work of divine grace and a gift of God. It commended the achievements of the Church in areas such as education and healthcare and the missionary initiatives ‘boldly undertaken’ by the young Churches of Africa.

Today’s visitor also leaves with the strong conviction that, while Africa’s needs are many and

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Tim O’Sullivan is a regular contributor to Position Papers.

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Book review:

Doctor Zhivago at 60: a spiritual masterpiece

Author Boris Pasternak Publisher Giangiacomo Feltrinelli

by Francis Phillips

T

his year marks the sixtieth anniversary of the publication of Boris Pasternak’s famous novel, Doctor Zhivago.

Problems with Russian censorship meant it was first published by the Italian publisher, Feltrinelli; the English translation followed in 1958, which was the year I first encountered it, aged twelve. This was the year that Pasternak was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, an event given an ominous dimension when he was forced by the Russian authorities to either renounce the prize or be exiled. Pasternak, for whom to live outside his homeland would have been unthinkable, chose the first option. Expelled from the Writers Union, he died, disgraced, in 1960.

This is the familiar background to Doctor Zhivago. Why, after sixty years, is it worth

celebrating this book when other Nobel Prize novels have fallen into obscurity? First of all, it is a true work of art. Pasternak was a poet first and a novelist second; his novel is imbued with an almost hypnotically intense poetical consciousness and a verse section containing ten poems was deliberately planned by the author to conclude the prose narrative.

Pasternak’s description of the qualities of a “great poet” in his Essay in Autobiography (he was writing about fellow-Russian Alexander Blok) could be applied to himself: “Passion, gentleness, dedicated insight, his own conception of the world, [a] gift for transforming everything he touched, his own … selfeffacing destiny [and] the quickness of his observations.”

These are the key features of his novel, recognised by generations

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of readers and reflected in the person of the eponymous hero, Yury Zhivago who is, to a significant extent, his author’s alter-ego. The word “Zhivago” is Church Slavonic for “the living”; Zhivago is a poet as well as a medical doctor, “unusually impressionable” and concerned, in his profession, “with the mystery of life and death itself.”

Indeed, witnessing the death of his mother-in-law, he muses on the paradox whereby art depicts death, “thereby creating life.”

against the poignant personal story of Zhivago, his friendships and most especially his love-life.

This last aspect, highlighted in the popular film by David Lean, reflected the complicated romantic life of Pasternak himself, endlessly conflicted between duty and domesticity and the inspiration of his mistress and muse.

Like Pasternak his creator, Doctor Zhivago experiences the most tragic episodes of twentieth century Russian history: from the pre-revolutionary period, growing up in a comfortable, cultured milieu; through the turmoil and savagery of the Revolution and the civil war; the setting up of a new, soulless Soviet society during the years leading up to World War II; and concluding in its immediate aftermath.

Thus the novel has a wide historical sweep. Political events are sometimes in the background, sometimes the foreground and always set

Nonetheless, a classic story including history, romance and poetry may not be a “spiritual masterpiece.” For instance, I would not describe either Wuthering Heights or Middlemarch in these terms, though they are indisputably great novels. What makes Doctor Zhivago a soulful pilgrimage for the reader as well as an imaginative feast is undoubtedly its mystical dimension. I use the word “mystical” in its broadest sense, meaning that Pasternak’s imagination contained a deeply spiritual strain (Zhivago’s Uncle Nikolay states that “the whole of life is symbolic, because the whole of life has meaning”).

Indeed, I would say this element is a touchstone of great poetry.

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Although not an orthodox (or Orthodox) Christian in the conventional sense, Pasternak believed that human life and history was much more than the expression of blind, inexorable, atheistic and materialistic forces (which was why his novel caused such unease and disquiet for the Soviet authorities.) His poetry is suffused with Gospel themes.

“Destiny”, “fate” and, to a lesser extent, “providential signs”, are words that occur repeatedly at key moments in the novel; places, encounters, dreams and events are all imbued with otherworldly significance; nothing is ever left to vulgar “chance”. For example, Yegraf, Zhivago’s half-brother whom he barely knows, appears mysteriously, almost miraculously, from time to time, to rescue him from the results of his folly and misadventures. Zhivago describes him as “My good genius ... a figure who is almost symbolical.”

dreamer yet a doctor, a flawed, suffering human being for whom everything is refracted through a poetical lens. At first welcoming the Revolution (as did Wordsworth, another poet, in another age) he comes to loathe its violence and to dread its wanton, senseless destruction of traditional values. His creator, in love with “Mother Russia”, was similarly hostile to the brave new world of Communism.

What, ultimately, does this work of art teach us? That truth does not reside in slogans, sound bites or systems but in the long, lonely, spiritual quest of individual men and women.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Francis Phillips writes from Buckinghamshire in the UK. This article first appeared in The Catholic Herald.

The personality of Zhivago himself is a tragic, hauntingly fascinating creation: superstitious yet intellectual,

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Director Damien Chazelle Starring Ryan Gosling, Emma Stone, John Legend, Rosemarie DeWitt USA

Film review: La La Land

by Joseph McAleer

T

hough it's set in present-day Los Angeles, the comedydrama La La Land (Lionsgate) takes a spirited stab at reviving the musicals of Hollywood's golden age.

Writer-director Damien Chazelle (Whiplash) dreams big in this over-the-top fantasy where drivers exit their cars on a freeway overpass and burst into song, and lovers float in the air amid the projected stars in a planetarium.

Beautifully shot in widescreen CinemaScope, La La Land is a unique and self-indulgent film, to say the least. But it tends to lose its way when song and dance take over. Fortunately, that's largely made up for by Chazelle’s engaging script, a cast of first-rate actors, and superb jazz music.

In the city where dreams are manufactured, two star-crossed lovers meet: Mia (Emma Stone), an aspiring actress, and Sebastian (Ryan Gosling), a jazz pianist. Each is driven toward a singular goal. Mia wants to be a movie star, while Sebastian hopes to open his own club.

Their gooey romance bubbles over into a series of numbers worthy of Gene Kelly and Leslie Caron. In this context, the corny dialogue is utterly appropriate, even charming: “It’s pretty strange that we keep running into each other,” Mia tells Sebastian. “Maybe it means something,” he replies. And how!

Needless to say, the path to success is rocky, and perseverance is sorely tested.

Mia suffers one humiliating audition after another.

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Sebastian, broke, joins a rock band led by his newfound friend Keith (John Legend), and heads out on the road, sacrificing his craft for a paycheck. Separation frays the relationship, and conflict ensues. As the music swells and Mia warbles tunes like ‘The Fools Who Dream’, the power of love to conquer all seems momentarily in doubt.

be inappropriate for children under 13.

The film contains an implied premarital relationship, a few rough terms and some crude language. The Catholic News Service classification is A-III – adults. The Motion Picture Association of America rating is PG-13 – parents strongly cautioned. Some material may

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Joseph McAleer is a guest reviewer for Catholic News Service (www.catholicnews.com).

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